Rose Sexton Johnson is an artist working at the intersection of domestic space, childhood, and the coexistence of purity and rupture. Her work explores what structures hold, what they fail to hold, and what remains in the aftermath. She lives and works in Stillwater, Minnesota.

Rose creates art related to the experiences of children. She feels it is important to speak of both the joys and the unspoken pain of children. Snapshots found in the work reference a child's experience of worries, shame, and longing. Rose's artwork rests at the tipping point between joy, purity, and vulnerability found only within a child.

In the studio, Rose trusts the youthful experiences of aimlessness, play, and mess-making as antidotes to pain and suggests that they are integral to life. Making is a mess. Mess is letting go. Letting go is transformation.

For Rose, the quickest route to playfulness is to use materials and processes that can be guided rather than controlled. She gravitates toward working with large-scale items and industrial materials often related to domestic spaces. Through manipulation of objects and materials, spaces shift from beautiful and calm to dark and unsafe and back again. Like a worn and broken toy cherished by a child, like the human heart, the artwork simultaneously breaks down and evolves.

A body produces its own pressure. Pressure pumps blood fast through the heart, keeps the body alive when threatened.

Stop, wrap a scarf tightly around the chest.

Now pressure comes from the scarf. From outside rather than within. The body is released. Inhale. Exhale. You are free.

Everyone has fear. Here is my scarf.